I’ve been trekking in the ‘number hill’ among the rows and columns of ‘dos’ and ‘dels’, finding little time to post the travel notes, when I found myself tagged again. I was unsure of taking it up, when a chance conversation provided the spark. I wanted to post something which was out of sync with my current state of mind. And the tag provided the license to quote.
“A person with more books than clothes”, the tagger said……used to be true, but the sad part is that now we, my books and I, are separated, by ‘three and a half hours’! It’s hard to reproduce all those magical moments, words which touched one’s deepest emotions, words which made one laugh, cry or see reason. Just as some fictitious friends who never went away, they kept coming back with more. To choose the best five will be almost impossible since the ranking may change and the internet is not yet multi lingual in every sense to access the quotes in my mother tongue, for the ones from my earliest readings. So here I’m assembling the five I could access or recall.
Being a teacher, I’m tempted to start with a prayer; recited by the Master and the disciple before they proceed to learn the wisdom of the Upanishads.
It reads;
“Om, Sahanavavatu;
Saha nau bhunaktu;
Saha viryam karavavahai;
Tejaswinavadhitamastu;
Ma vidvishavahai.
Om shantih, shantih, shantih.”
And it means " May He protect us both. May He nourish us both. May we both work together with great energy. May our study be thorough and fruitful. May we never hate each other.Om Peace! Peace! Peace! "
Having attained the peace of mind required for the post, let me think of my reading. What kind of books I should read?
“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
The “I” is not me. It’s Franz Kafka, writing to his friend (Letters To Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904)
And I found one such book rather early in my life which more or less shaped my world view;
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age, the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”
said the Preface to ‘Les Miserables’.
And then came the age of hopes and aspirations, and the ‘Great Expectations’;
“According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is that, that when I loved her with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection”
All such stories can go either of the two ways, and mine was something like Saroyan says in ‘Here Comes There Goes You Know Who’;
“I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inside all and careless of all.”
But I don’t consider myself unlucky. Over the years I have learned to take life as it comes. And all good books must have an ending. Let me sign off with the "The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth";
"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans."
"Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky."
"When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift — that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies — that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter — that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body — it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed — that's the finest I know."
"So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you."
How can someone call himself unlucky, after Lou Gehrig had proclaimed himself, the luckiest?!
Thank you very much!!
All the police men guarding the consulate looked very young and their leader, slightly older, wished us and asked us where we were from. He smiled, when we told him that we were from India. Dr. Suryakant had reserved room in a motel nearby and had the map of the locality with him. But we had trouble locating the motel as there were no sign boards in English. So we approached the police ‘chief’ with the map. He asked us to wait there and began running, his assistant on toe. We were wondering what he was up to, when his assistant came running back and led us to the motel. We thanked the chief and his team and proceeded to the Grand Motel. 
